Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday April 27, 2014 @08:15PM
from the almost-good-enough dept.

CowboyRobot (671517) writes "Erik Meijer, known for his contributions to Haskell, C#, Visual Basic, Hack, and LINQ, has an article at the ACM in which he argues that 'Mostly functional' programming does not work. 'The idea of "mostly functional programming" is unfeasible. It is impossible to make imperative programming languages safer by only partially removing implicit side effects. Leaving one kind of effect is often enough to simulate the very effect you just tried to remove. On the other hand, allowing effects to be "forgotten" in a pure language also causes mayhem in its own way. Unfortunately, there is no golden middle, and we are faced with a classic dichotomy: the curse of the excluded middle, which presents the choice of either (a) trying to tame effects using purity annotations, yet fully embracing the fact that your code is still fundamentally effectful; or (b) fully embracing purity by making all effects explicit in the type system and being pragmatic by introducing nonfunctions such as unsafePerformIO. The examples shown here are meant to convince language designers and developers to jump through the mirror and start looking more seriously at fundamentalist functional programming.'"

From the viewpoint of the general public, we can simplify it to "Programmers are brain damaged." This conclusion is often especially obvious to management, who find programmers both incomprehensible and arrogant. After all, would a truly sane person clearly tell their bosses that something can't be done the way the bosses said it is to be done? But programmers do this all the time, so they must be mentally deranged.